once again, thanks sir randy for a great and excellent presentation...much appreciated! another lesson to be learned and familiar with the new technology...although that was 2012 class, the devices are absolutely amazing!

thanks again to digikey and design news for bringing this continuing education for us PDH Certificate gainer...

Good lecture, got very excited about vison technology back in the 80's for inpection systems tried to get management interested enough to fund a project to explore this technology, but they could not see any use for this technology..... their loss.

This fires the imagination. I did not know these devices existed. I would think the manufacturers offer development kits with some screening process for eligibility. These must be expensive in some cases.

* You mentioned software, and perhaps it will be touched on in terms of integrating sensors to industrial control such as PLC or LabView or embedded applications in future classes in this session or the Industrial Control Classes coming up ...

does anybody know a vision sensor that can distinguish between a glass tube being filled by, say, sand and a glass tube that is full of sand?

There is (or was) a company in Everett, Washington that made a "Curtain of Light" that would tell you exactly how full the jar was. I worked there briefly but can't remember the name. It's similar to Mannesman (Tally) but that was a printer company.

I guess the sensor method has a lot to do with "parts on hand" and just good enough. I think vision is a great non-contact method, but sometimes things like guided wave or free space radar may be OK in larger applications.

Q. What General functional-Architecture is associated with Smart sensor design?

Strictly speaking, smart sensor has definitions associated with it that IEEE experts developed (IEEE 1451). There are a lot of specific definitions. However, the term smart sensor is used by many companies and has many meaning associated with it. You really have to look at the data sheets. In more and more of the semiconductor sup[pliers sensors, such as accelerometers, gyroscopes and pressure sensor,the supplier uses the company's MCU to provide the smart capability. As these sensors are designed into more complete sensor modules, the architecture can vary significantly.

If the fill stream completely blocks the tube, so light cannot penetrate thorugh, than cannot use a through beam. Diffuse reflective with background supression will have similar issue, if stream is able to block beam before it fills up. You are better off using a capacitive sensor mounted to the tube. Omron has them. Easy enough application for those sensors

[Q] If a photoelectri sensor shows a poor precision and accrurate output, what do I check or make a fix the part of the system that the sensor attached. According to yesterday your slide #3 and the followed web site, the better accuracy would increase the cost, but I can't this, I'd like to change some circuitry part or system architecture, if it is possible. So I'd like to obtain the better precision output even though the accuracy will not improve. What about your recommandations?

What kind of processor are you typically using with the vision systems you have developed? What is the least amount of processing you have used?

I have not personally developed a vision system but I know that several of the well-known and leading semiconductor suppliers have a vision sensing MCU in their portfolio, expecially if they addrress automtive applications. If I remember right, they frequently are based on the ARM processor.

syakovac: I learned today that it would pay off to get a _module_ reducing the vision problem as far as possible for your "backend" processing. you'd trigger the sensor, it would "do its thing" and report back "match" or "no match"

Snandu, re illomination LEDs... These are usually IR at about 900nm. The human eye cut off is about 850 nm, so the output is invisible; however typical camera chips made using silicon are responsive to over 1 micro-meter. Your TV remote uses the same illumination diode, and consumer video cameras can see the digital signal from these LEDs, usually even with an IR cut filter in place.

Q. What of the effect of the medium on the light path.....refraction, dispersion attenuation?...... on effectiveness of the sensor.

With vision sensing a great question. In non industrial applications such as automotive these all can play a limiting role of the effectiveness of the sensor. In fact, to overcome the limitations two different sensing techniques are often used for vehicles that need to sense traffic for warning systems. vision and radar or lidar are the choices fro these applications. In industrial, I would expect that the variations in the operating enviroment would ahve to be considered under extrme cicumstnaces. I have seen little about them causing a non functioning system.

I didn't see much for examples of low-cost machine vision. What do you like for low-cost complete solutions for robotic vision for navigation in full light without relying on high speed computation to "fix" the image? If you don't have good examples, how would you go about shopping for such a device? What do you look for specifically in terms of specifications and features?

Randy, when we go to greater fps rates combined with higer resolution, memory and cpu power thends to increase perhaps quadratically. Can you summarize some typical examples of industrial application requirements as a funciton of static and dynamic resolutions?

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I don't know what happened to the website today. Just because I restarted the browser today, after installing some updates, I went to the usual page and took 20 minutes to get in. Initially it went to an applet with a pretty lady and a button, which didn't take me into the CEC calendar. Very difficult.

anyone know of a way to charge a series-connected stack of nine supercaps?? I've looked at some supercap chargers but they only handle two cells. Shoulld i look for a Lion chip that does nine? Any comments would be appreciated.

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Industrial workplaces are governed by OSHA rules, but this isn’t to say that rules are always followed. While injuries happen on production floors for a variety of reasons, of the top 10 OSHA rules that are most often ignored in industrial settings, two directly involve machine design: lockout/tagout procedures (LO/TO) and machine guarding.

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